So my ol' X71SL is starting to show its age and as much as it saddens me, I think I'll need a new daily driver and I am very intered in the Asus UX32VD.

I intend to dual boot if I end up buying it, and I was wondering how that would work out given the dual nature of the storage on this laptop (a hybrid 500GB HDD + 24GB SSD).
Will Ubuntu and Windows be able to share the storage space? If yes, will Ubuntu also be able to use the SSD the same way Windows will, to speed up the system?

In case this is not the right place for this question, please be so kind as to direct me to another place where I could get an answer.

2 Answers
2

Dual graphics might cause issues, but I don't know how the current state of dual graphics support (bumblebee etc.) is.

For the storage part, that hybrid HDD is probably a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB since Seagate seems to be the only manufacturer selling hybrid HDDs. The 500 model should have additional 4 GB of solid state memory that is not exposed to the operating system and works like the usual drive cache, but larger and a bit slower.

The 24 GB SSD should be a PCIe mini card module, something like this. (Update: Instead of PCIe mini card it would probably be mSATA) I would recommend installing Ubuntu onto the SSD, that would be a very good solution, since Ubuntu itself does not need a lot of storage space (3 to 6 GB). However remembering CES 2012, manufacturers were very happy to show us running a customized version of Android while Windows was booting or as some sort of battery saving mode. That 1 GB difference might be the space occupied by Android. Currently with the details of implementation unknown (signed bootloaders, UEFI, S-ON etc.) I would not bother tinkering with this. Sure there is Ubuntu for Android and Linaro (mostly for ARM based CPUs) but it's up to the manufacturers to make this work, or at least to make it no more cumbersome as needed. So forget about that SSD for now until there are more details.

Back to the hybrid drive. Like said, the SSD part is not to be exposed, so this drive can be partitioned like usual. However I can't say how the hybrid feature works out with 2 different operating systems or how it impacts the system performance in general.

This is very likely to be an UEFI based system which varies from the traditional BIOS/MBR devices. But since this is not a Tablet running Windows 8 and UEFI support worked well since 11.10, that's what I tested, I do not see major issues for running dual boot on this device.

That's not a hybrid drive, those have a small 4GB+ SSD as a cache to accelerate the HDD (Momentus)

What you have is essentially a small SSD and an HDD so if you want to dualboot you simply have to choose which OS goes into which drive, because with 24GB you can't fit both in the SSD and have a good experience IMO.